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OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

bloomberg.com

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Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#281

Post by YeBanKo »

mrtksn wrote: post #98
breadwinner wrote: post #57

The key question in my mind is not who is going to be on the new board, but whether Ilya Sutskever will stay if Altman comes back. I worry that OpenAI without Ilya is not going to produce groundbreaking innovations at the same pace. Hopefully Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever can patch things up. That's more important than who they add or remove to the board.

Currently, it’s very unclear who operates under what motives. How much is it about ego? How much is it about money and how much is it due to intellectual positions? Maybe there’re are no heroes and maybe there’re no antiheroes? With the recent news about other investments and deals, the facade doesn’t seem to even resemble the OpenAI’s reality. I can’t wait to read the autobiography of involved parties.

Initially I thought it iwas about money. Now it seems to be about intellectual position: Sama wants to move fast and break things, Ilya does not. I don’t want my bank to replace customer support with LLM agent, that has access to internal APIs or LLM driving a medical decision just yet.

As an example, couple years ago Crisis Text Line decided to sell data to a for profit spin off. Their justification was that data was anonymized, which was bs for it’s unstructured text data, and that it’s not against terms of service, which users had agreed to. Mind you, these users were people in crisis maybe even on a brink of a suicide. This was highly unethical and caused a backlash. Then one of the bod members wrote a half assed “reflection” post [1]. If some core employees of CTL did a “coup” to stop this decision, because they believed it’s unethical and dangerous, wouldn’t it be justifies?

[1] http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/01/31/crisis-...

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#282

Post by keerthiko »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #249
jasonhansel wrote: post #173

This is why, when you claim to be running a non-profit to "benefit humankind," you shouldn't put all your resources into a for-profit subsidiary. Eventually, the for-profit arm, and its investors, will find its nonprofit parent a hindrance, and an insular board of directors won't stand a chance against corporate titans.

The problem, though, is without the huge commercial and societal success of ChatGPT, the AI Safety camp had no real leverage over the direction of AI advancement worldwide. I mean, there are tons of think tanks, advocacy organizations, etc. that write lots of AI safety papers that nobody reads. I'm kind of piqued at the OpenAI board not because I think they had the wrong intentions, but because they failed to see tha…

I agree. I think a significantly better approach would have been to vote for the elaboration of a "checks and balances" structure to OpenAI as it grew in capabilities and influence.

Internal to the entire OpenAI org, sounds like all we had was just the for-profit arm board of directors. Externally, you can add investors and public opinion (basically defaults to siding with the for-profit arm).

I wish they worked towards something closer to a functional democracy (so not the US or UK), with a judicial system (presumably the board), a congress (non-existent), and something like a triumvirate (presumably the for-profit C-suite). Given their original mission, it would be important to keep the incentives for all 3 separate, except for "safe AI that benefits humanity".

The truly hard to solve (read: impossible?) part is keeping the investors (external) from having an outsize say over any specific branch. If a third internal branch could exist that was designed to offset the influence of investors, that might have resulted in closer to the right balance.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#283

Post by tsunamifury »

pkaye wrote: post #273
jasonhansel wrote: post #173

This is why, when you claim to be running a non-profit to "benefit humankind," you shouldn't put all your resources into a for-profit subsidiary. Eventually, the for-profit arm, and its investors, will find its nonprofit parent a hindrance, and an insular board of directors won't stand a chance against corporate titans.

Doesn't Mozilla run the same way with for-profit under a non-profit?

How’d that work out for them?

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#284

Post by tsunamifury »

optimalsolver wrote: post #275
stefan_ wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft had to put out a statement "its all good we got the source code" clearly the openness of OpenAI was lost a while ago. This move of the board was presumably primarily good for the board.

>Microsoft had to put out a statement "its all good we got the source code" IP lawyers would sell their own mothers for a chance to "wanna bet?" Microsoft.

Uh … no? It’s practically impossible to win a suit with Microsoft to that degree inside a decade. And by then you’ll have lost anyways.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#285

Post by shivawu »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #261
g42gregory wrote: post #182

From the article: "...but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation..." This is not a good sign. Microsoft the largest $10Bn investor, who is in the middle of pushing through the restructuring of the company, hasn't decided if they want board representation? The only reason you would do that if they want to keep their options open, in the future, to hit OpenAI hard (legally and/or to raid the per…

Everyone keeps saying that Microsoft made a huge mistake by not having board representation, and I couldn't disagree more. Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI was really ideal from a speed-of-advancement perspective. That is, reams and reams have been written about how Google has to move at such a slow pace with AI productization because, essentially, they have so much to lose. Microsoft saw this first hand with the…

Exactly this. This incident has proven MSFT’s strong hands without a board seat and they don’t really need it if things do/did go off the rails.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#286

Post by junofan »

cyanydeez wrote: post #219
aunty_helen wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board were literally doing their job. Anyone claiming incompetence is just mistaken about the stated goal of openai: safe available agi for all. Throw in a huge investment, a 90 billion dollar valuation and a rockstar ceo. It’s pretty clear the court of public opinion is wrong about this case.

they likely could have negotiated it better, but I agree, all these Altman fans really suggest the cult of business sapping any nonprofit motive.

Their actions were reckless and irresponsible. They are currently picking their successors. The incompetence is staggering regardless of motive.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#287

Post by dboreham »

staticman2 wrote: post #134
tempnow987 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, you have a nonprofit board firing a CEO at a board meeting that doesn't even sound like was properly noticed. Was the board president even given time to attend? And Microsoft has total rights to the models and weights, so they can CONTINUE their services and then spin up with Sam's new company.

* Uh, you have a nonprofit board firing a CEO at a board meeting that doesn't even sound like was properly noticed. Was the board president even given time to attend?* I think it's reasonable to assume that even a controversial board checked with their lawyer and did what was legally required. Especially as nobody involved seems to be claiming otherwise.

Difference between "legally required" and "above clown car level professionalism".

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#288

Post by rvnx »

junofan wrote: post #286
cyanydeez wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they likely could have negotiated it better, but I agree, all these Altman fans really suggest the cult of business sapping any nonprofit motive.

Their actions were reckless and irresponsible. They are currently picking their successors. The incompetence is staggering regardless of motive.

We're still waiting for the explanations from Altman about the alleged involvement in spending time on conflicting companies while he is CEO at OpenAI.

According to FT this could be the cause for the firing:

“Sam has a company called Oklo, and [was trying to launch] a device company and a chip company (for AI). The rank and file at OpenAI don’t dispute those are important. The dispute is that OpenAI doesn’t own a piece. If he’s making a ton of money from companies around OpenAI there are potential conflicts of interest.”

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#289

Post by aeonik »

AmericanOP wrote: post #222
rvnx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that the move of the board was actually good for openness of AI ?

Openness in the context of AI is not straightforward. The open source folks read it one way, and the alignment people read it another. It is entirely possible a program that spits out the complete code for a nuclear targeting system should not be released in the wild.

Nuclear codes, assuming they are using modern cryptography would not be spat out by any AI, unless they were leaked publicly.

Bigger concern would be the construction of a bomb, which, still, takes a lot of hard to hide resources.

I'm more worried about other kinds of weapons, but at the same time I really don't like the idea of censoring the science of nature from people.

I think the only long term option is to beef up defenses.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#290

Post by junofan »

gizmondo wrote: post #163
bossyTeacher wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The OpenAI board as of now looks incompetent by sacking and then trying to rehire their most public figure in the span of a few days. Lacks determination, confidence and commitment

I don't think the board is trying to rehire him though, more like being pressured to do so against their wishes.

They are currently in talks to rehire him. It would seem they wish to rehire him?
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